


The soft places and the fire within

by imsfire



Series: Fragments from the multiverse [11]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU Post-Canon, Angst, F/M, Feels, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, feels and mild angst, lovers and their thoughts, watching the other sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 19:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19979050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: Two different nights, and lovers watching over one another and thinking about their relationship, and what they have gained and learned with one another.





	The soft places and the fire within

**Author's Note:**

> For day four of thefulcrumcaptain's Cassian week 2019, for the prompt, Favourite relationship.

1

There are soft places in her, he knows that now. Deeply hidden and deeply held. It’s strange to look back on the hard-faced woman he watched that first day coming into the briefing room in Pyramid Four. The look of blistering contempt she had turned on the room; on Mothma’s young aide as they uncuffed her wrists hastily, and then on Draven, Mothma, and himself. A woman like an ice-block, he’d thought; a wall of ice-blocks. Cold as a slab and as deathly.

His hand rests on her hipbone as she lies asleep, warm and relaxed beside him now. Just below the bone, he can feel relaxed muscles and tendons; just above, the velvet texture of the skin on her belly, and the softness of the few areas that have never been scarred or torn, or burned, not even by the sun.

Jyn shifts slightly, sighs, rolls a little nearer. The completeness of her trust, to let him hold her like this while she sleeps, to be so vulnerable to him; it’s a blessing he never looked to have in his life. A gentleness, held against his burned soul. Her faith once given, she is constant and certain in it; and she gave it to him. Sometimes he trembles with the intensity of his disbelief, seeing her look at him with love and gratitude. How far they had to come, to find one another.

There are soft places in Cassian too, unshelled at last after twenty years of war. The miracle of allowing them, of seeing his weaknesses and letting them be seen, has made everything he knew about himself strange and new. It’s strange too to look back on himself that first day, the hard, caged man who watched Jyn as she was led into the meeting, and categorised and dismissed her as trouble and a fucked up mess, and probably a waste of their time.

Tenderly he gathers the woman he loves into his arms, and she mumbles in her sleep and puts out a hand, onto the hard box of his ribs, the soft edge of his belly. She’s his mess, he thinks, and he is hers. 

They shift closer, and hold one another, and sleep.

2

“What is fire?” she remembers asking Saw once. It was at the point when her mind had started to chafe against its own emptiness and she mourned the fact no-one could answer her questions anymore unless they were about weapons or tactics or the politics of rebellion. She must have been about ten.

It was in a ruined depot, she remembers that too. The vines of Onderon already invading through shattered windows, taking the structure back into forest. The forest was slow but it was inexorable, if they could just have led the enemy unarmed into the darkness under the trees and left them to its devices it might have devoured them all.

Saw had been sitting watching while she made a campfire; and crouched over it, feeding in little twigs once the flames were established, she’d asked without much expectation of a answer “What is fire? I can see what it _does_ , but what _is_ it?”

“It’s a reaction,” he’d told her. “A visible reaction process.” But then instead of chemistry and physics he’d talked about metaphors, of the fires of courage and the flames of resistance, the embers of revolt that it was their task to fan. “The fight against the Empire is like a fire, because of the heat of our passion for freedom; and we will burn the enemy down! Their oppression is the fuel, like that brushwood you’ve collected. Their injustice is the spark, and fire is the reaction of the free sentient soul to the theft of their liberty. Reaction to wrong, made visible.”

The fire she’d made that day spat and hissed on green leaves, until finally it burned hot and flamed out fast; and she remembers thinking she was none the wiser about what fire was, only that she was to live in it, until she too spat and burned.

The flames of the little campfire she’s made tonight are silent. They dance and quiver in the darkness, and light flickers on Cassian’s sleeping face.

It’s strange to remember now how impassive she once thought him. His spy-face; she even called it that sometimes when she was talking to him. He’d been trained to keep his thoughts hidden, where she had merely been hardened into it by desperation. His face is disciplined, inexpressive, and it saves him every time from the casual watcher; the ‘trooper on patrol, the stranger in the street, they see a blank, and pass on, looking past, looking through, looking for those whose eyes show guilt or anger or fear, not the one who seems uninterested to the point of boredom.

And all of it fell away, that studied blankness, when you knew him. Though he kept the outward emotion muted, strictly controlled, there were signs everywhere, now she knew to see them. Cassian has tells; the way he moistens his lips, the way he looks down for a second to assimilate unwelcome news or unwanted orders. His eyelids would crease, his lips tighten or soften, by the tiniest degrees; but she knows them now. Impassive he is not, not now she can read him.

As he, Force knows, has always read her.

It’s a flickery kind of face, she thinks, watching him sleep now. As strong as a flame and as infinitely reactive, little subtleties of expression gleaming in his eyes and vanishing, tiny nuances like laminations of colour, like fine high cloud, oblique light, forest dapple; the pearling of a thousand-toned iris as the pupil of an eye contracts in thought.

Back when she couldn’t read him she’d resented him, and feared his careful face. She’d insulted his expressionlessness to try and ease the uncanny hurt it caused her. All the while, inside, knowing how one could be shaped by life and ill-luck to look like this, to hide behind one’s own eyes, one’s own frozen lips. He’d watched her from the first, and she’d begun to watch back, and the blank screen of Cassian had come to life, with hidden messages, flickers of fire within. It seemed ridiculous suddenly that she’d once thought his face empty of thought; now when he looked at her, it was so full she could have sung it aloud. She knows now he is a man who never stops thinking. Even now in his sleep, his face flickers with expression; the eagerness of dreams, the quiet trouble of thought.

Jyn feeds dry splinters of wood into the fire; watches the visible reaction lick at them and their edges blacken and begin to glow. Smouldering, catching, a sudden mute blaze. And in his sleep Cassian draws in a long breath that makes his nostrils flutter, and exhales again.

Three more hours till dawn. She sits and keeps watch over him.


End file.
